The great public v private education con job

By Julie Szego

18 August 2018 — 11:44pm

In a recent video for the Public Education Foundation, a NSW not-for-profit whose name describes its mission, three high-profile alumni of government schools talk up the sector. Professor Larissa Behrendt, the first Aboriginal to graduate from Harvard Law School, former High Court judge Michael Kirby and The Chaser and War on Waste’s Craig Reucassel recall fondly the teachers who set them on a path to distinction. Reucassel tells how he often meets public school graduates who are visible – ministers, media personalities, people in the arts – "but they don’t really brag about it. Maybe we should be bragging a bit more about the schools we went to".

Illustration: Matt Davidson

Indeed, and maybe governments should be bragging a bit too, spruiking their sector, trumpeting its achievements, reassuring the 60 per cent of taxpayers whose children attend government schools that they have their backs, will not tolerate complacency, mediocrity, ill-discipline. Let’s hear ministers crow about sending their own kids to the local high.

We rarely hear such sentiments because since the Howard years there’s been an undeclared war – yes, a class war – against public education, with our political lords eroding confidence in the system either through overt rhetoric or in more subtle ways, the negative messaging amplified by obscene funding inequities.

The reasons for the war: 1. Like elsewhere in the West, Australia’s political elite is disconnected from the concerns of ordinary people, and 2. Our political leaders are hostage to a private schools lobby that purrs about wanting the best for all schools, but they don’t, obviously, because it’s a law of the market that competitors seek to crush each other.

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Education Minister Simon Birmingham.Credit:AAP

At present, the Catholic education sector, emboldened by a Labor victory in the Longman by-election and its continuing jihad against Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham, is pitching for what it claims is a fairer funding deal for its schools. The Catholics’ claims might have validity within the context of our flawed funding regime. But their rhetoric reveals precisely the market logic I spoke of earlier, encompassing hostile intent towards government schools, even if that hostility comes disguised in kindly sentiment.

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Writing in Eureka Street, Catholic Social Services Australia chief executive Frank Brennan trots out the line that private schools need public funds to ease pressure on the public system. “Many parents who choose free government schools could afford to pay, especially those living in the wealthier suburbs. Some of these parents expend great wealth to purchase houses in the finer suburbs so that their children can access the best state schools for free.” But incomes of public school families aren’t relevant at all – because universal public education is ... universal and public.

Brennan argues that reduced government funds to the Catholic sector might force some parish schools to raise their fees and this might force families back to the local public school. “Is the Coalition or Labor prepared to pay a premium for the maintenance of Catholic and other non-government primary schools so that state governments do not need to pay even more for an expanded state system?”

So governments should give private schools more money so they won’t have to put more money into government schools? Flawless logic.

The same argument was more stridently put by Stephen Elder, of the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria, in response to state education minister James Merlino’s soft boast in May that “what we are seeing for the first time in more than 30 years is a significant increase in parents actively choosing to send their kids to a government school”. (At the time it was reported that drawing more families to public schools is Andrews government policy. Did you know that? I didn’t. Boast louder, James!)

Elder, sore that the Victorian government did not allocate his sector more funds for capital works in this year’s budget, said: “It’s fine for the state government to talk about booming state school enrolments, but they are denying parents choice and crushing aspiration by starving Catholic schools of the support needed to meet demand.”

Education Minister James Merlino.Credit:AAP

Elder suggests families who have chosen state schools have had this choice forced on them. And that truly “aspirational” folk – notice how the more we talk about aspiration in this country the less we actually achieve, be it in home ownership, income or education – wouldn’t short-change their kids by sending them to a public school.

For years we’ve been sold this con job that funding private schools takes pressure off the public system when the reverse is true. A bigger public system would offer economies of scale. Gutting high schools of middle-class families, their resources and networks, residualising public education so that it becomes an option of last resort, with plunging standards and expectations, simply increases the long-term welfare burden for taxpayers. And what about the long-term psychic injury we’re inflicting on ourselves by raising children in stratified and segregated environments?

Former priest Paul Collins recently said, “We need, within society, some balance to the ... ‘what's in it for me?’ syndrome. Something that goes beyond the self. That, I think, is what, at its best, the Catholic system is doing.”

At a time of growing inequality, when liberal democracy finds itself under siege, the real balance to “what’s in it for me” is the local high school: open to all comers, accommodating many faiths and backgrounds but striving for a common language and universal truth. The case for public education is more urgent than ever.